Dragoslav Šiljak

Dragoslav Šiljak was a reserve with the Yugoslavian water polo team that won silver at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics but he did not see any playing time. He graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Belgrade, but continued to compete internationally and domestically, winning national titles in 1958 and 1959. This led him to be selected again as a reserve for Yugoslavia at the 1960 Roma Games, where his nation finished fourth and he once again did not take part in any matches.

Šiljak completed his PhD in electrical engineering in 1963 and, one year later, moved to the United States to take up a position at Santa Clara University. His work focused on control systems that were taken up by NASA. In the 1980s he and his research team developed new and original concepts and methods for the decentralized control of uncertain large-scale interconnected systems.

Šiljak received numerous honors and awards for his research. In 1981 he served as a Distinguished Scholar of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science, and became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was selected as a Distinguished Professor of the Fulbright Foundation in 1984, and in 1985 became an International Member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 Šiljak received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council, “for his fundamental contributions to the theory of large-scale systems, decentralized control, and parametric approach to robust stability”.